A Madness of Sunshine

by Singh, Nalini

  That done, he trained the beam of his own flashlight on what turned out to be a serial number, snapping a photo of that with his phone.

  Dawn was still four hours off when Will and Anahera arrived at the fire station. Nikau was the only one there. “I sent Mattie home,” he said. “One of the other women went with her and knows to stay the night. That fuckwit she’s hooked up with isn’t exactly going to be any help.”

  Will nodded. “The search crews find anything?”

  “No. I told everyone to go home, come back when it’s light. No use going over and over the same areas in the dark.”

  “I’ve called in the situation,” Will said, having taken care of that prior to heading for the dump. “We’re not going to get any air support. They’ve got two missing children just outside Greymouth.” An adult woman missing less than ­twenty-­four hours couldn’t compare to two children under ten who hadn’t been seen since they left school the previous day. It didn’t matter what Will’s gut said about Miriama being in serious trouble.

  “Daniel has a helicopter,” Nikau bit out with a curl of his lip. “Maybe if you ask, his lordship will deign to help.”

  “Grab some ­shut-­eye, Nik.” Engaging the other man in a conversation that involved Daniel would never have a good outcome. “I’ll need you at full capacity come morning.”

  Teeth gritted and blood in his eye, Nikau said a terse good night before leaving to walk home.

  Anahera didn’t speak until Nikau was out of earshot. “You’re planning to talk to Daniel, aren’t you?”

  Glancing at his watch, the cop said, “Might as well wait till morning now. Probably have a better chance of getting his cooperation if I don’t wake him up at two a.m.”

  “Daniel wasn’t always an ass,” Anahera felt obliged to say. “If Nik’s your only source on him, well, they have a ­history…”

  “No. I’ve had dealings with Mr. May myself.” He left it at that, and she knew she’d get nothing if she attempted to dig deeper.

  Hard gray eyes met hers. “I’ll drop you home, but I need to detour to the station first and send through an information request to Miriama’s cell phone provider.”

  “To check if her phone is still active?”

  “Or when it was last active,” Will said. “I assume you want to help with the search in the morning?”

  “Of course.” She wouldn’t be able to breathe easy knowing Miriama was out there alone, likely hurt. “What will you be doing?”

  “The same thing.” The cop began to turn off the fire station’s internal lighting. “And hope we find some small fragment of her. Because even in the dark, you can’t miss an entire woman.”

  The last light went out.

  15

  Will drove up to the May estate twenty minutes before dawn, while the sky was steel gray brushed with smoke at the edges. He wanted to talk to Daniel before light broke over the horizon, so that if the other man agreed, they could get the chopper up in the air as quickly as possible.

  If Daniel turned him down, Will had a few other strings he could tug, a few friends who’d step into the breach; the problem was, most of them didn’t live near the coast. It’d take time for them to fly here, and every instinct he had told him time was critical. He didn’t listen to the voice that said it was already too late.

  Reaching the gate at the start of the long drive that led up to the house, he pushed the buzzer twice in a row. The male voice that came on was ­wide-­awake and distinctly irritated. “No, this isn’t a public road and no, you can’t hike through.”

  “Mr. May,” Will said before Daniel could hang up, “it’s Detective Gallagher. I need to speak to you on an urgent matter.”

  A little to his surprise, the electronic gate began to draw back at once. He waited only until it had pulled back enough to allow his vehicle through.

  Like all the properties in this area, the estate was surrounded by rich native ferns and ancient trees that blocked out the sunlight to form a lush green atmosphere reminiscent of a primeval rain forest. With dawn on the horizon, everything was soft and misty and colored in myriad tones of gray. It was eerie, he supposed, but there was also a stark beauty to it as long as you knew that this landscape could kill you if you weren’t careful.

  The house that appeared out of the ­gray-­shrouded green wasn’t the showy monstrosity you might expect from a man who liked to flash his wealth, but then Daniel May hadn’t built it; the house had been built by his parents, who’d both passed on a few years back within twelve months of each other. A graceful architectural creation constructed of glass and wood that had been polished to a honeyed shine, it rose just high enough above the treeline that, from the top of the house, you could see the ocean. Otherwise, it was designed to blend into the landscape.

  The helicopter pad was set to the right of the property, some distance from the house itself. In between, there was a tennis court and a swimming pool. A guesthouse the size of an average family home sat to the left of the main house. None of these things on their own would’ve made Daniel a pariah in town; the Baker family had the same kind of wealth, though from a different source, and they were well liked. It wasn’t money that divided Daniel from the others in Golden Cove, it was Daniel himself.

  Parking his vehicle, Will got out. Daniel had already stepped out of the house and was walking toward him, a slender man of about ­six-­two with ­shoulder-­length brown hair tied back in a queue. His features were fine, his ethnicity difficult to pinpoint. According to the locals, Daniel’s mother had been Korean, his father ­white—­of English descent. May Senior had apparently been very proud that the family history could be traced all the way back to the first settlers in this region.

  Despite the early hour, Daniel was dressed in crisp black pants and a raspberry pink shirt. The color should’ve looked ridiculous on a grown man, but somehow, Daniel pulled it off. “What’s this about?” he asked, a frown between his brows and a steaming mug of coffee in one hand. “Does it have anything to do with all those flashlights I saw on the beach last night?”

  Will didn’t particularly like being talked to as if he was the hired help, but as he needed the man’s assistance, he decided to keep it civil. “Miriama is missing.”

  “Missing?” Daniel took a sip of his coffee, not making any move to offer Will a cup. “Are you sure she hasn’t just taken off to see the sights somewhere else? The girl’s too beautiful to be happy stuck in a ­dead-­end town.”

  “She went missing while out for a run.” Will’s temper had never been a hot thing of rage and ­fury… not until the night of the fire. It had cooled again in the aftermath, and he could handle Daniel’s smug sense of superiority without losing control. “I came to ask if you’d help with an aerial search.”

  “I’ve got meetings out of town today. What about the police helicopters?”

  “There’s another ongoing case involving children.” He’d checked in with his commander, been told the choppers would be going up again at first light, along with a massive army of search volunteers. Will could be frustrated with the allocation of resources while agreeing with ­them—­the children had to be a priority.

  “If you won’t help, just say so. I’ll have to call in private aerial teams from outside and they’ll take time getting here.”

  He thought it was the word “outside” that did ­it—­Daniel might turn up his nose at the town, snubbing all the social events to which he was invited and making it clear he didn’t think most of the residents were fit to lick his boots, but he also considered himself the most important man in Golden Cove. It was his town; he couldn’t stomach the idea of outsiders coming in and taking over.

  That, of course, was part of his problem with Will. Daniel had expected Will to fall in line. His first month here, Will had accepted a dinner invitation from Daniel and his ­sulky-­faced wife. In a place this small and remote, the local cop had to make an effort to build bonds no matter his own desire to keep a distance.

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p; It had been toward the end of the night, as Daniel walked him to his vehicle, that the other man had made it clear he expected Will to keep him informed of everything that went on in Golden Cove. “You understand?” he’d said in that supercilious master-­to-­servant tone. “This is my town and I like to keep my finger on the pulse. You’ll find I’m a generous man to those who please me.”

  Will had simply said, “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” and left.

  Two days later, he’d received a call from a friendly senior officer who’d told him to watch his back. Daniel, it turned out, had tried to get Will fired. “Just be careful,” the older man had said. “May might live in Golden Cove, but he has connections everywhere.”

  Now the ­self-­professed Lord of Golden Cove grimaced. “I’ll take up the chopper.” A pause before he added, “I’ll need a spotter. Might as well be you if you’re ready to go up.”

  Will looked at the horizon through the breaks in the trees, saw the first blazing edge of daybreak. “I’ll call, inform the rest of the search party.” While he did that, Daniel went back inside the house to tell his wife his plans and to inform his secretary that he’d be late.

  “Nik,” Will said when the call was answered, “I need you to run the entire ground operation for the time being. Go back over all the areas we did last night, search deeper where you can, and don’t forget the dump and other outlying areas.”

  “No problem.”

  Will stared out at the trees backlit in orange flame by the rising sun. “And spread the word that I want to know if people saw anything even vaguely related yesterday afternoon.” Will needed a starting point to begin the ­investigation—­a piece of Miriama’s clothing, a description of a stranger in town, a report of a local seen with Miriama, something.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m going up with Daniel.”

  A taut silence, followed by, “I’ll make sure the others know, so they can signal if they spot something on the ground that could do with a bird’s-­eye view.”

  “I’m not sure what the cellular reception will be like in the chopper,” Will said, “but if you have a major discovery, get the people on the beach to all wave. It’ll be easy to spot that with how low we’ll be flying.”

  “You’ll have a signal.”

  It was only after the other man hung up that Will wondered why Nikau was so certain about the cell signal. He knew damn well that Nik wouldn’t have gone up with Daniel, and since Daniel was the only one who flew the sleek black ­machine…

  Right.

  It had to be Keira who’d contacted her ex-­husband from the chopper. Either she’d done it at Daniel’s behest, or she’d sneakily messaged Nikau while her husband was busy at the controls. Neither sounded particularly good for Nikau’s already screwed-­up head.

  Daniel reappeared, having changed into jeans and a ­long-­sleeved white shirt that was probably worth five times the monthly salary of most of the people in town. Neither one of them said a word as they headed to the chopper. Will had already grabbed the binoculars he kept in the ­SUV—­in a place with terrain this rugged, it paid to have them handy.

  Once inside the helicopter, he pulled on the headset that would allow him to talk to Daniel, then asked the other man to skim along the coastline first, before going inland and over the areas where Miriama was most likely to have run.

  The sun’s rays broke completely through the last of the mist as they rose into the air. Will glimpsed a small and curvy woman with ­blonde-­streaked brown hair on the verandah of the estate house, her elegantly boned face lifted to watch the chopper and her hands gripping the railing. She was wearing a red negligee and, despite their distance from the house, the wind from the chopper blades pasted the silk and lace of it against her body, outlining a shape that had driven many a man to his knees.

  Then the chopper was up and at an angle that made it impossible to see Keira May any longer. Dismissing Daniel’s wife and Nikau’s obsession, Will raised the binoculars to his eyes and began to scan the landscape. It looked even more unforgiving from up here. Serrated black rocks that thrust up from the sand in huge broken shards, foaming water that took no prisoners, and a wilderness so tangled and thick that it was difficult to see beneath the canopy.

  Daniel went down low without prompting, low enough to give Will the best possible chance of spotting a woman lying injured below. The one thing in their favor was Miriama’s bright choice of running gear.

  “Did you try on the other side of the whirlpool?”

  Will didn’t look away from the trees below, intent on spotting even a hint of hot pink or orange. “What’s on the other side of the whirlpool?”

  “A kind of cave formed by the way the rocks fell there,” the other man said, his voice echoing through the headphones. “We used to hang out in it as ­teenagers—­it’s safe at low tide.”

  Daniel angled the chopper back over a particularly dense patch of trees so Will could take a second look. “There’s a running trail right above the cave that hardly anyone uses. It was totally overgrown the last time I overflew it, but Miriama likes to run and she’s good at it. Maybe she went ­there—­it’s definitely a more challenging track.”

  Will calculated how long Miriama would’ve had to run to get to that spot, knew it was far too long, but they had to check every possible option. Could be she’d been enjoying the run so much she’d gone far beyond her normal distance. “Let’s go.”

  From above, the whirlpool looked like the mouth of hell, spilling and crashing and so dark that it felt as if its depths went on forever. Bones cold with the knowledge that if Miriama had fallen anywhere near the dangerous spot, she was gone, Will continued to scan through the binoculars.

  But if he hadn’t known to look for the rock formation that formed a cave, he’d have missed it, it was so well camouflaged to match the neighboring rocks. A second later, he realized Daniel wasn’t the only one who’d thought of the spot. A male body stood in front of the stone archway, one hand on the rock.

  Nikau.

  Though he looked up at the sound of the chopper, Nikau didn’t wave. Instead, he ducked under the stone to disappear inside. “We should focus on the cliffs above,” Will said to Daniel. “Nikau can check out the cave.”

  Fine lines bracketing his mouth, Daniel didn’t argue for once. They skimmed along the top edge of the cliffs back to the other side of the whirlpool and, while most of it was tangled growth that hadn’t been disturbed for years, Will did spot what might’ve been a disturbance in one small section. Using his phone, he asked one of the nearby searchers to have a look.

  “Definite signs someone stood or walked through here,” the man confirmed. “But it’s not churned up like if Miriama went over the edge.” A small pause. “Almost as if a pig hunter maybe walked out of the trees behind me and came to stand here, look at the view.”

  “Okay, leave it as it is,” Will said. “I want to have a look myself.”

  Hanging up, Will considered the cave again and frowned. That cave was exactly the kind of secretive and private spot teenagers loved. It should’ve passed from teenage group to teenage group in a town like this, but for whatever reason, it had been abandoned. Forgotten.

  It made him wonder what secrets lay within, what secrets tied Daniel to Nikau, Nikau to Anahera.

  16

  Anahera trudged through the forested track beside Vincent, conscious of the sound of the chopper fading into the distance. Nikau had designated her and Vincent a search team after they were two of the earliest people to turn up at the fire station. Peter Jacobs had also turned up around the same time, but thankfully, Nikau had matched the garage owner with one of the more experienced hunters.

  “You look bad, Vincent.” Always his full name or Vin, never Vinnie; he simply wouldn’t respond to anyone who tried to call him that. “Do you know Miriama well?”

  “I love my coffee, you know that.” A ­self-­deprecating smile that didn’t reach the arresting tawny shade o
f his eyes. “When I’m in Golden Cove and working from home, I see her pretty much every morning and every afternoon. She always has that smile. So bright. So much life to her.”

  Anahera thought again of the lovely young creature she’d met and felt a shivering chill within. The world had a way of crushing things that were beautiful and so bright that they glowed. “Is there any chance she might’ve just taken off?”

  “Matilda says all her stuff is still in her room. Her wallet, her favorite jeans. She only took her phone and the ­iPod—­just what she normally takes on a run.”

  Anahera had been afraid that would be the answer. She looked desperately into the trees, in the hope she might magically spot a flash of cheerful orange or brilliant pink. But there was only verdant green and healthy brown, the curling fern fronds delicately lit by the morning sunlight that speared through the canopy.

  She’d missed this so much, this primeval landscape unlike any other place on Earth, but she knew the beauty around her could be deadly. There’d been more than one lost hiker over the years she’d lived in Golden Cove. The tourists came, saw the initially unthreatening lushness of the bush and didn’t listen to warnings to be careful, to stick strictly to the marked paths.

  They’d go off the track “just a little” to take a photograph or chase a native bird, and the next thing they knew, they’d be turned around and scared and unable to find their way back out through the dense growth. If the hikers had been smart and filed a plan with the town’s tourism office, then a search would be mounted as soon as they didn’t show up at the appointed time. But too many weren’t smart.

  By luck, most had stumbled out or been found by locals who lived wild.

  At least three hadn’t. All over the course of a single hot summer. And all young women from distant corners of the world.